Music Business Worldwide stands by its original reporting and argues that if these artists were, in fact, not contracted by Spotify to create the music, we'd be able to see their music on other services, like YouTube and Apple Music. The author also points out that the allegedly Spotify-created tracks have generated more than 520 million streams, which would amount to more than $3 million in royalty payouts. The author quotes a "senior music executive" who says that the strategy, if true, is designed to lower the amount of music on playlists from "legitimate" labels, thereby saving Spotify a ton of money over having to pay royalties to label-backed artists.

Spotify's original statement said that the company pays royalties "for all tracks on Spotify, and for everything we playlist. We do not own rights, we are not a label, all our music is licensed from rightsholders and we pay them -- we do not pay ourselves." While the statement seems unequivocal, there's still room for interpretation, depending on how the company defines a "rightsholder."

Proving that things tend to turn up when you least expect them, NASA has just rediscovered a satellite it lost in space more than a decade ago. The Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration was launched in 2000 to create the first comprehensive images of atmospheric plasma.
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According to William Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Directorate at NASA who also testified at the hearing, the US is currently covered through fall of 2019, thanks to seats we have purchased on Russian Soyuz rockets.
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